Operator of Japan's wrecked Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant prepares to restart another plant

[mahatmakanejeeves]

Associated Press Finance
Operator of Japan's wrecked Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant prepares to restart another plant

MARI YAMAGUCHI
Mon, Apr 15, 2024, 9:17 AM EDT2 min read

TOKYO (AP) — The operator of the tsunami-wrecked Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant said on Monday that it has obtained permission from safety regulators to start loading atomic fuel into a reactor at its only operable plant in north-central Japan, which it is keen to restart for the first time since the 2011 disaster.

Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings, or TEPCO, said that it obtained the Nuclear Regulation Authority’s approval to load nuclear fuel into the No. 7 reactor at its Kashiwazaki-Kariwa nuclear power plant in Niigata and it was to start the process later Monday. The loading of the 872 sets of fuel assemblies is expected to take a few weeks.

The Kashiwazaki-Kariwa plant, which is the world’s biggest, has been offline since 2012 as part of nationwide reactor shutdowns in response to the March 2011 triple meltdowns at the Fukushima Daiichi plant.

Reactors 6 and 7 at Kashiwazaki-Kariwa had cleared safety tests in 2017, but their restart preparations were suspended after a series of safeguarding problems were found in 2021. The Nuclear Regulation Authority lifted an operational ban at the plant four months ago.

{snip}

[NNadir]

1. Good. It will save lives.

More people died from shutting Japan's reactors than died from radiation releases at Fukushima.

[Kid Berwyn]

2. Really?

Please, share a link to the studies you reference.

From what I've seen since March 11, 2011, the governments of Japan and the United States, along with TEPCO and General Electric, have been unwilling to share data about the extent of radioactive contamination of Japan and the planet, let alone the human health impacts from the Fukushima disaster.

[NNadir]

4. Really? Antinukes want references?

This is new.

I repeated ask antinukes to report, from reputable reports, using the primary scientific literature, what the death toll from radiation releases at Fukushima was/is/will be.

My personal electronic library has oodles and oodles of papers touching on the subject.

I have over 20 years at DU reported on the death toll related to dangerous fossil fuels, about which they couldn't care less. Generically I often cite the Lancet paper from 2020, Global Burden of Disease, and Hansen's famous paper from 2013 clearly showing lives saved (up to that point) by nuclear energy.

I have yet to meet an antinuke who gives a shit about the 80 to 90 million people who died from air pollution over the last 13 years they've been mindlessly carrying on about Fukushima without ever showing any evidence that they've bothered to open a scientific paper on the subject.

The Fukushima obsessed are members of a cult, and experience teaches that no amount of information can change recitation of a cult's dogma.

The information on radiation releases from the Fukushima and the related death toll is the subject of much reporting in the scientific literature which I've been following for all 13 years. Addressing whether Japan killed more people by burning fossil fuels when they shut their reactors would require that the addressee actually understand thar fossil fuels are incredibly dangerous.

I can easily pull up reference to the number of radiation deaths at Fukushima as well as the numbers connected with the needless evacuations driven by radiation paranoia but right now I'm not at my computer. Producing this information is unlikely however to impress a single antinuke. Again, no amount of information can address the dogma of a cult, whether the cult is Trumpism, antivaxism or antinukism.

[Kid Berwyn]

5. So, no links.

FYI: While I am anti-nuke, I do give a shit "about the 80 to 90 million people who died from air pollution over the last 13 years." That's why I bring up plutonium, spread across Japan and around the planet from Fukushima.

About that:

DOE-STD-1128-98

Guide of Good Practices for Occupational Radiological Protection in Plutonium Facilities

EXCERPT...

4.2.3 Characteristics of Plutonium Contamination

There are few characteristics of plutonium contamination that are unique. Plutonium
contamination may be in many physical and chemical forms. (See Section 2.0 for the many
potential sources of plutonium contamination from combustion products of a plutonium fire
to radiolytic products from long-term storage.) The one characteristic that many believe is
unique to plutonium is its ability to migrate with no apparent motive force. Whether from
alpha recoil or some other mechanism, plutonium contamination, if not contained or
removed, will spread relatively rapidly throughout an area.

Original Source (link now bad): http://energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2013/07/f2/doe-std-1128-98_cn2.pdf

Internet Archive (where you can download your very own PDF copy): https://web.archive.org/web/20170218203802/https://energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2013/07/f2/doe-std-1128-98_cn2.pdf



Something important from nine years ago about the dearth of public Fukushima information:

News Coverage of Fukushima Disaster Found Lacking

American University sociologist’s new research finds few reports identified health risks to public

By Rebecca Basu
American University, March 10, 2015

Four years after the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, the disaster no longer dominates U.S. news headlines, though the disabled plant continues to pour three tons of radioactive water into the ocean each day. Homes, schools and businesses in the Japanese prefecture are uninhabitable, and will likely be so forever. Yet the U.S. media has dropped the story while public risks remain.

A new analysis by American University sociology professor Celine Marie Pascale finds that U.S. news media coverage of the disaster largely minimized health risks to the general population. Pascale analyzed more than 2,000 news articles from four major U.S. outlets following the disaster's occurrence March 11, 2011 through the second anniversary on March 11, 2013. [font color="green"]Only 6 percent of the coverage??129 articles—focused on health risks to the public in Japan or elsewhere. Human risks were framed, instead, in terms of workers in the disabled nuclear plant.[/font color]

Disproportionate access

"It's shocking to see how few articles discussed risk to the general population, and when they did, they typically characterized risk as low," said Pascale, who studies the social construction of risk and meanings of risk in the 21st century. "We see articles in prestigious news outlets claiming that radioactivity from cosmic rays and rocks is more dangerous than the radiation emanating from the collapsing Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant."

Pascale studied news articles, editorials, and letters from two newspapers, The Washington Postand The New York Times, and two nationally prominent online news sites, Politico and The Huffington Post. These four media outlets are not only among the most prominent in the United States, they are also among the most cited by television news and talk shows, by other newspapers and blogs and are often taken up in social media, Pascale said. In this sense, she added, understanding how risk is constructed in media gives insight into how national concerns and conversations get framed.

Pascale's analysis identified three primary ways in which the news outlets minimized the risk posed by radioactive contamination to the general population. Articles made comparisons to mundane, low-level forms of radiation;defined the risks as unknowable, given the lack of long-term studies; and largely excluded concerns expressed by experts and residents who challenged the dominant narrative.

[font color="green"]The research shows that corporations and government agencies had disproportionate access to framing the event in the media, Pascale says. Even years after the disaster, government and corporate spokespersons constituted the majority of voices published. News accounts about local impact—for example, parents organizing to protect their children from radiation in school lunches—were also scarce. [/font color]

Globalization of risk

Pascale says her findings show the need for the public to be critical consumers of news; expert knowledge can be used to create misinformation and uncertainty—especially in the information vacuums that arise during disasters.

"The mainstream media—in print and online—did little to report on health risks to the general population or to challenge the narratives of public officials and their experts," Pascale said. "Discourses of the risks surrounding disasters are political struggles to control the presence and meaning of events and their consequences. How knowledge about disasters is reported can have more to do with relations of power than it does with the material consequences to people's lives."

While it is clear that the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear meltdown was a consequence of an earthquake and tsunami, like all disasters, it was also the result of political, economic and social choices that created or exacerbated broad-scale risks. In the 21st century, there's an increasing "globalization of risk," Pascale argues. Major disasters have potentially large-scale and long-term consequences for people, environments, and economies.

"People's understanding of disasters will continue to be constructed by media. How media members frame the presence of risk and the nature of disaster matters," she said.

SOURCE with Links: http://www.american.edu/media/news/20150310-Fukushima.cfm

One might think discussing the disaster at Fukushima would be of interest to those who care for humanity, life and our planet. That would be, in fact, democratic.

[NNadir]

6. In general antinukes can't read very well.

They love innuendo like there's some conspiracy by the media, the government blah, blah, and lazily Google their way to junk links about the same trying to validate their ignorance.

Now, I really am disinterested in trying to educate antinukes because like antivaxxers, again no amount of information can change their minds.

Again, it's a cult.

For instance a piece of information would be that Japan is still there. There isn't a huge pile of dead bodies lying in the Fukushima prefecture killed by radiation poisoning.

As for reading comprehension, in my previous post I noted I'm not at my home computer. I can provide links although it will be as useless as the very real information that climate change and the fact that the planet is burning doesn't reach people whining and crying about Fukushima which on any human scale is trivial.

[Kid Berwyn]

10. Ask Helen Caldicott: Anti-Nukes Can Read Just Fine.

Crisis Without End

The Medical and Ecological Consequences of the Fukushima Nuclear Catastrophe



The world’s leading scientific and medical experts offer the first comprehensive analysis of the long-term health and environmental consequences of the Fukushima nuclear accident

Edited by:Helen Caldicott

“The clock cannot be turned back. We live in a contaminated world.” —Hiroaki Koide, Kyoto University

On the second anniversary of the Fukushima disaster, an international panel of leading medical and biological scientists, nuclear engineers, and policy experts assembled at the prestigious New York Academy of Medicine. A project of the Helen Caldicott Foundation and co-sponsored by Physicians for Social Responsibility, this gathering was a response to widespread concerns that the media and policy makers had been far too eager to move past what are clearly deep and lasting impacts for the Japanese people and for the world. This was the first comprehensive attempt to address the health and environmental damage done by one of the worst nuclear accidents of our times.

The only document of its kind, Crisis Without End represents an unprecedented look into the profound aftereffects of Fukushima. In accessible terms, leading experts from Japan, the United States, Russia, and other nations weigh in on the current state of knowledge of radiation-related health risks in Japan, impacts on the world’s oceans, the question of low-dosage radiation risks, crucial comparisons with Chernobyl, health and environmental impacts on the United States (including on food and newborns), and the unavoidable implications for the U.S. nuclear energy industry.

ORDER A COPY HERE:

https://thenewpress.com/books/crisis-without-end

[NNadir]

11. Antinukes, like members of any cult, like to cite one another.

Helen Caldicott is a pathetic idiot, who like most antinukes doesn't or didn't (if she's still alive to spread her toxic and deadly rhetoric) give a shit about air pollution deaths or climate change.

On a way it's a good thing that she put her medical career aside to work in the toxic antinuke cults. I can't imagine she was a competent physician since she worked so hard to perpetuate the use of fossil fuels which kill people.

Decades ago I used to very much enjoy the late great Professor Bernard L Cohen's take down of her and his detailed expositions of just what an idiot she was.

Dr. Cohen's been dead a long time of course, but his absence did not make Caldicott's rhetoric any more or less toxic r deadly.

A member of the antinuke cults citing Dr. Candicott is about as convincing as someone citing Franklin Graham to prove the existence of Jesus.

The problem with cults is that the membership is terrified of stepping out of its closed circle of dogmatists to see the world at large.

In the case of antinuke cults, like antivax cults, the price paid is a vast scale of death.

[Kid Berwyn]

12. Money & Paradox

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” — Upton Sinclair

[NNadir]

13. Never expect a member of a cult to adddress an...

Last edited Fri Apr 19, 2024, 05:16 PM - Edit history (2)

...unavoidable truth that conflicts with dogma with anything other than specious innuendo.

I could easily accuse members of the antinuke cults of being paid by the fossil fuel industry whose interests they've served so well all these decades, but they've generally neither bright enough, educated enough, or ethical enough to understand the consequences of their absymal ignorance.

I only need to note that the war in Ukraine was financed by the sale of fossil fuel sales generated by German antinukes.

Putin didn't even have to give the antinuke community a commission. They did it for free wallowing in their intellectual and moral vacuousness.

By the way, when the war is over, and Ukraine survives the consequences of the Euros German antinukes sent Putin, that country, the site of Chernobyl, plans to build more nuclear reactors. They know what Putin does with the money from the successful marketing carried out by the ignorant antinuke community. Unlike flakes like Helen Caldicott they oppose fossil fuels.

I also note that antinukes, a set of bourgeois malcontent consumers generally, lack the moral depth to understand that people do things for reasons other than money.

I'm an old man at the end of my life, and money will soon enough have no meaning for me, and still I fight this fight because, unlike antinukes who couldn't care less about the roughly 20 thousand people who will die today from air pollution, I have a sense of decency. The future of humanity and the planet matters to me.

I would recommend that my bourgeois antinuke acquaintances try a sense of decency on for size, but that like getting them to educate themselves enough to understand numbers, is a lost cause.

Have a wonderful weekend.

[NNadir]

8. Link #1 to information that will not change the mind of any member of the Fukushima cult.

I apologize that it's not from some dumb shit antinuke sociologist handing out conspiracy theories, but rather from the primary scientific literature but it is what it is.

The number of radiation related deaths, for one example of a public festival of ignorance, Fukushima, is reported in this paper (by a set of scientists whose whole scientific life is connected to studying the effects of radiation at Fukushima:

Comparison of mortality patterns after the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant radiation disaster and during the COVID-19 pandemic ( Motohiro Tsuboi et al 2022 J. Radiol. Prot. 42 031502)

It's open sourced, but an excerpt is relevant:

However, in the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant(FDNPP) accident, no direct health hazards due to radiation, such as acute radiation injury, were observed, while various indirect health effects were reported even in the acute phase [2, 3]. Major health effects are attributed to the initial emergency evacuation and displacement, deterioration of the shelter environment, evacuation from nursing homes, and psychological and social health effects. In addition, there were also the effects of medical collapse, where lives that could normally be saved by medical care could not be saved due to a lack of medical resources [4, 5]. It is known that these effects are particularly susceptible to the socially vulnerable [6].

.

I added the bold.

Now the rest of the cited text - some of these authors live and work in Fukushima and have always done so; their institution is Fukushima Medical University, Fukushima City, Japan - indicates that the fear of radiation killed people, but radiation itself didn't. By the way, this group has published hundreds of papers on the topic.

It's easy to find these hundreds of papers, and papers like them, if one steps out the circle jerk of antinukes citing each other to spread ignorance.

I fully realize however, that this link to scientific information will not impress any members of a dogmatic cult, because no amount of information can address a cult or the dogma it hands out.

It's a waste of time to try to educate the uneducable.

The next link, if I bother with the useless exercise of trying to educate the uneducable, will be from a Nature journal, a publication from 2023, which calculates the number of people who will be killed in the United States by a nuclear phaseout, breaking them down by ethnicity and economic class.

[NNadir]

9. Link #2 to information that will not change the mind of any member of the Fukushima cult.

I apologize, again, as in the first case, that it's not from some dumb shit antinuke sociologist handing out conspiracy theories being cited by another antinuke who couldn't give a rat's ass about climate change, but rather from the primary scientific literature but it is what it is.

Nuclear power generation phase-outs redistribute US air quality and climate-related mortality risk. Nat Energy 8, 492–503 (2023).

From the text:

Closure of all nuclear power plants across the United States (no nuclear) leads to more mortalities due to air pollution and climate compared to a baseline scenario (base). There are an additional 5,200 annual mortalities due to changes in PM2.5 and ozone under no nuclear. These health impacts are a similar order of magnitude as those estimated in studies on the impact of proposed carbon policies such as the Clean Power Plan on air quality (3,500 avoided premature mortalities were projected to result if the Clean Power Plan were implemented)32. Compared to the base, there is a central estimate of 78,000–170,000 additional mortalities over the century due to the changes in CO2 emissions from 1 year of no nuclear. These mortalities compound with each year of continued emissions. Our scenarios do not account for changes in demographics over time, or changes in electricity demand, which is expected to increase with the electrification of transportation and buildings, thus putting more burden on the system if nuclear power is shut down.

.

The authors are from MIT, but I'm sure that there are plenty of dumb shit antinuke sociologists around to offer up a conspiracy theory that they're involved in a cover up.

I fully realize however, that this link to scientific information will not impress any members of a dogmatic cult, because no amount of information can address a cult or the dogma it hands out.

It's a waste of time to try to educate the uneducable.

Ignorance kills people, and as ignorance goes, antivaxxers, a similar set of ignoramuses who carry on about subjects about which they know nothing, can't hold a candle to antinukes, whose death toll in the time they've been whining stupidly about Fukushima has led to around 90 million air pollution deaths, not even counting climate change.

Have a nice evening.

[NickB79]

7. Climate change is already killing hundreds of thousands annually, and will get much worse over time

In the past 20 years, it's killed 4 million people globally:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-023-02765-y

It's projected to kill 14 million ANNUALLY by 2050:

https://www.weforum.org/press/2024/01/wef24-climate-crisis-health/

After Fukushima, Japan had resorted to coal and natural gas to replace shuttered nuclear reactors, dumping millions of extra tons of carbon into the atmosphere. Bringing the reactors back online helped stop this carbon surge:

https://www.straitstimes.com/asia/east-asia/japans-annual-emissions-falls-to-record-low-as-industrial-pollution-shrinks

Japan’s emissions surged after the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster led to reactor shutdowns and heightened dependence on fossil fuels. Emissions peaked at 1.4 billion tonnes in 2013/14 but have since declined, helped by greater use of renewable energy and the gradual resumption of reactors.

Even the absolute worst-case scenarios for reactor meltdowns and radioactive release don't come close to those numbers. Over the next 50 years, the number of possible deaths from Fukushima will be a fraction of a percentage of the deaths from fossil fuels.

Carbon emissions are far, far more lethal than anything nuclear power can cause. People need to understand this better. A coal plant is more dangerous than a nuclear reactor. A natural gas power plant, even used to back up wind and solar farms, is more dangerous than a nuclear reactor. A fleet of a million gas-powered cars in a city is more dangerous than a nuclear power plant.

Fossil fuels are most lethal when they working right, while nuclear reactors become lethal when everything goes wrong.

[hunter]

3. It will improve this ugly situation:

Last edited Mon Apr 15, 2024, 12:16 PM - Edit history (1)

A carbon intensity of 481 gCO₂eq/kWh

https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/JP-TH

Since the accident about 70% of the region's electricity is generated with fossil fuels.

When the nuclear power plants were shut down the shortfall in generating capacity was made up for with imported coal and liquefied natural gas.

This is what happens whenever nuclear power plants are shut down.